I get there’s less and less air pressure the closer you get to sea level, and therefore it requires less energy for water to boil, but how does air pressure correlate to energy? I have a tendency to think about things at the molecular level, and can’t seem to work this one out in my head.
In: Chemistry
My standard explanation of states of matter is to think of a bunch of young kids sitting on the floor in a classroom. A solid is where they’re all sitting nice and calm. Add in some energy, and they begin to jostle about a bit, which takes up more space. Maybe they’ve got enough room to move past each other to speak to their friends. This is a liquid. Add in some more energy, and occasionally one of the kids at the back will just stand up and wander about the room. This is evaporation. If there’s enough hype that one of the kids from the middle stands up and starts walking around, this is boiling. When they’re all energetic enough that they just walk about freely, you’ve got a gas.
Okay, so now let’s add in some air pressure. This is like the older kids who are standing around acting as monitors. If a kid starts to misbehave and looks like they’re evaporating, the monitor can calm them down. But if there’s too much energy and too many kids are getting hyper at once, there aren’t enough monitors to go around and the kids start to boil.
Now suppose we take away half of the monitors. This is like a lower atmospheric pressure. Since there aren’t as many monitors, it’s even easier for the kids to get too hyped up for the monitors to cope, and we reach boiling point much sooner.
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